On the subject of boot sectors and partitions and all that, do you know if re-formatting a pendrive (in WindowsXP or Linux) clears the MBR as well as the partitions?

As a recreational Puppy user (I am guilty of still, after two years on this forum, having my main system use WinXP ) I can tell you quite certainly that, at least with Windows, formatting does nothing to the MBR -- even through WinXP's storage stuff under Administrative Tools. gparted will help you there, but Windows will not _________________

I was afraid that might be the case with the MBR. I'll have to rely on the installation programs to re-write it. I don't think that Gparted can do anything to the MBR, only specific programs that write MBRs, like the one that installed Puppeee 4.4. That was bootinst.bat, and wrote:

I used Puppeee quite a lot previously. In fact I still have it installed on the EeePC 900's 4G internal SSD. I have two other Puppeees - one on an USB stick and the other on a SD card. I really enjoy the fun that the small netbook and puppies have brought me.

Yes, I am enjoying Puppeee 4.4 a lot, even if some of the apps don't work <grin>.

As soon as I find a distro that I'm 99% sure of, I'll try to put it on an SD card and leave it in the SD slot on the side of my Eee 1000HA. Nice thing, that slot. A lot of people don't even know it's there.

Today I tried to install Slitaz 4.0 on a USB stick with the Slitaz USB creator. No dice. The developers put out new releases but forget to upgrade their support programs. Typical.

Tomorrow I'm gonna finally break down and try out one of these installer programs like LinuxLive or Universal USB Installer. I'm wasting a lot of time with bad installs. Gotta try and speed up this process, 'cause I've got a lot of distros to weed through.

Thanks for your support. I may very well end up sticking with Puppeee 4.4. It works.

You gave me a few chuckles, there. And I'm very relieved to hear that I can re-format and re-install on the flash drives. I'll try to stop worrying, although the article at siduction.org didn't help to clear my psyche.

Regarding Gparted in Puppeee 4.4, I used it today to look at a pendrive that had an unbootable install of Slitaz, and I couldn't get any right-click context menu for it at all, so couldn't do ckdisk. Any idea how to activate the right-click menu? It would be very useful, to say the least.

Darn but I get ticked off when programs don't do what they're supposed to, even after twenty-five years of computing. (I'm tempted to mention the nasty word that starts with a "W" and ends with an "s", but will refrain.)

These problems never arose with emacs in Unix. Maybe we've taken a wrong turn somewhere. Too much developing and too little development.

Regarding Gparted in Puppeee 4.4, I used it today to look at a pendrive that had an unbootable install of Slitaz, and I couldn't get any right-click context menu for it at all, so couldn't do ckdisk. Any idea how to activate the right-click menu? It would be very useful, to say the least.

Usually you gotta umount it first before a check. Right click handles that also. I don't know why right click is not working on your save file. I would boot your puppeee pendrive in

Code:

puppy pfix=ram

mode and see if gparted right click with slitaz pendrive works in that mode. Sounds like a corrupted save file to me in your puppeee pendrive install since you say right click
in gparted is broken. Just a desert bikers guess though.

you can type in puppy pfix=ram at the pretty grub choice screen when puppy pendrive boots up. Then hit enter key.

I finally got the Gparted right-click context menu working again, I'm not sure how. Like you say, it was probably a bad boot.

What exactly does "puppy pfix=ram" do? Is that the menu choice to run in RAM?

There's nowhere to enter commands on my boot-up screen, just a list of choices, most of which I don't understand.

Doesn't Puppeee always run in RAM, thus requiring those saves to the save file?

While on the subject of boot-up choices, how do I get it to stop making those saves to the save file, which seem unnecessary to me? One save at shutdown would be fine, no? They interrupt what I'm doing and waste power.

Since I'm picking your brains (hope you don't mind), is there a reasonably easy method of installing other live Linux distros onto a pendrive from Puppeee 4.4? I just wasted two days fruitlessly trying to do it using Windows-based programs like Unetbootin, Universal boot loader, LinuxLive, and Live USB. I tried them with maybe ten different distros and nothing would boot. Very frustrating. There must be some way to do it using Puppeee 4.4 and the live-CD iso files I've collected. Any ideas?

puppy pfix=ram boots without using your save sfs file. It is a prsitine boot. Try it sometime.

I think yumi handles multiboot pendrives. Naming save .sfs should give a choice on which to load on boot also. If none. Make a blank .sfs in home and name it 1blank.sfs
Now you should get a choice on which save file to boot up.

@kb8amz

Edit: link is no good anymore

is my cloud copy puppy-rc7-atom. Mike 7 can give you the link for stored 1.0 cloud copy of puppeee. I am busy with honey dews today.

http://ubuntuone.com/03spbbxEXin5IN44Qn1xNx is still good for downloading the Puppeee 4.4 files. It´s in the tar.bz2 format, which can be handled by any good zip utility.

The distro uses a DOS batch file (bootinstall.bat) to write the MBR, a really good idea since so far this is the only distro I have succeeded in getting to boot from a pendrive without going through an iso on CD. Clever, those Puppeee folks!

-- Does Puppeee load everything, including the save file, into RAM and run in RAM as the default?

Re YUMI, I have not tried it yet. I first want to try out the individual distros. And frankly, after all the trouble I am having with the other flash drive installerss, I doubt that YUMI will do any better.

I am still in the dark how to stop Puppeee 4.4 from doing saves every 20 minutes while still saving on shutdown. Do I need to edit the save2flash file (which I believe is a shell command)? If so, any idea how to do that?

I went to the linked page (How to Make a Bootable Flash Drive using GRUB2) and read your whole article through carefully twice, then printed it out to study it. I will have some questions on specific points in it later, if that is okay.

For now, though, first this one: Should I use isobooter.tar.gz or isobooter_other-1.0.tar.gz, for installing distros like Tiny Core Linux and Slitaz?

I am asuming that ISObooter runs only in Linux. That is, it cannot make bootable pendrives from WindowsXP (the op sys on my hard drive). Is that right?

Anecdotally, I tried to use the Puppy Universal Installer that came with Puppeee 4.4, and which was meant only to install Puppy, to put Grub onto a flash drive on which I had already placed the files from an iso of TinyCorePlus 4.7.4. The application allows you to choose where it will install Grub, and I guessed correctly that it was sdc1 (I am running Puppeee from sdb). Grub did get put onto the flash drive, but, probably because I do not know how to edit the files properly, the flash drive still was not bootable. Maybe I get a star for a good try, though <grin>.

One last thought for now: Because I had so much trouble trying to install Slitaz on a pendrive (their own tazusb.exe does not work!), I went into the Slitaz forum and asked for help. They told me that Slitaz could not be installed onto a FAT file system, so none of the installers that run in Windows would work. Strangely enough, though, most of those installers list Slitaz as a supported distro. Any comment on this?

Cheers for now. I will get back to you when I have had a chance to download and try to use ISObooter.

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forumYou cannot attach files in this forumYou can download files in this forum